To Advance Artificial Intelligence, Reverse-Engineer the Brain

Your three-pound brain runs on just 20 watts of power--barely enough to light a dim bulb. Yet the machine behind our eyes has built civilizations from scratch, explored the stars, and pondered our existence. In contrast, IBM's Watson, a supercomputer that runs on 20,000 watts, can outperform humans at calculation and Jeopardy! James J. DiCarlo, MD/PhD, is a professor of neuroscience, an investigator in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines, and the head of the department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Neither Watson, nor any other artificially "intelligent" system, can navigate new situations, infer what others believe, use language to communicate, write poetry and music to express how it feels, and create math to build bridges, devices, and life-saving medicines.